All quotes are from THE MAP THAT LEADS TO YOU by J.P. Monninger.
1. It is the last great minute before he walks into your life, but you don’t know that, can’t know. Later, though, you will try to imagine where he was in this exact instant, when he had turned and started to travel toward you, you to him, and how the world around both of you took no notice. Your life would not be the same, but that was all waiting, all up in the air, all fate and chance and inevitability.
2. They say you can never leave Paris; that it must leave you if it chooses to go.
3. The world always seems right on the edge of becoming a bad frat party.
4. You can tell if someone is a worrier or not, a frightened or brave person, a clownish type or a serious person by his or her sleep expressions.
6. A book is a companion, though. You can read it in a special place, like on a train to Amsterdam, then you carry it home and you chuck it on a shelf, and then years later you remember that feeling you had on the train when you were young. It’s like a little island in time. If you love the book, you can give it to someone else. And you can discover it over and over, and it’s like seeing an old friend.
7. I hate taking photos of everything. It means what’s going on now is only this thing we perform so we can take pictures and look at them later. It dilutes whatever we’re doing.
8. Have you ever heard someone say that books are places we visit and that when we run into people who have read the books we have read, it’s the same as if we had traveled to the same locations? We know something about them because they have lived in the same worlds we have lived. We know what they live for.
9. It’s strange to think about how quickly things can change.
10. Physical reality can never meet the demands of the mind.
11. Sometimes I think ideas are just things to play with. Little thought experiments.
12. New York City is no more of a prison than anyplace else in the world. It’s an island with a bunch of stuff on it. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not so good. But it’s all life.
13. When someone tells you twice that they have a better plan for your life than you do yourself, well, those are warning bells. You need to pay attention to that.
14. You couldn’t go back to believing the same things about human beings as you did before. You just couldn’t.
15. It’s not a free pass to hurt other people. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to think of people as simply another experience. You don’t get to play around about being in love and then pull back because you never wanted to be involved in the first place. That’s using people.
16. You know where the real prison is? It’s in your head. We live in our heads. You can travel your legs off, but you’re still going to be right inside your brain when the day is done.
17. It was better to speak in short, declarative sentences without volunteering too much.
18. Life doesn’t happen someplace in the future. Life happens here and now, and it’s a fool’s bargain to let something good go now in the hope of something better at a later date.
19. Everything else in the world will go along, sometimes failing, sometimes prospering.
20. The world is unpredictable. You can’t plan everything.
21. Hate what’s false; demand what’s true.
22. Isn’t that a metaphor for life? We all think we have one more good day, but maybe we don’t.
23. Nothing in the universe is always.
24. Ever notice how women who see almost everything can ignore the biggest clues imaginable?
25. Great love inevitably carries with it great loss.
26. I learned that love is not static; love does not divide. What love we find in this world is coming toward us and traveling away from us simultaneously. To say we find love is a misuse of the word find. Love finds us, passes through us, continues. We cannot find it any more than we can find air or water; we cannot live without either thing any more than we can live without love. Love is essential and as common as bread. If you look for it, you will see it everywhere, and you will never be without it.
27. Whatever else he had meant or been to me, he had unlocked something inside me that had been rusted and clotted with disuse. He had given me hope and taught me to trust that life held surprises if you allowed it to reveal itself. You did not clutter it with camera shots and Facebook postings. You gave yourself to the situation.
Deekay Daily Reads 